I don’t know, I think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is his best movie. That is saying a lot because Kill Bill is epic… but Hollywood is sincere and personal. I think it is the movie that has the most of him in it.

I liked the slow realization that the film may be building towards the Manson/Tate murders. It was a fun & anxious slow burn. Watching Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate just be a nice person wondering around being a free spirit starts to build the anxiety of “will it” or “won’t it” happen at the end. If you weren’t familiar with the backstory of the Manson family or the Sharon Tate murder then that plot-line’s emotional effect falls flat with the viewer. Those murders were a watershed event that helped accelerate the end of the golden age of Hollywood.

Brad Pitt’s character being close to so much temptation, money and fame but staying grounded and an anchor for his troubled friend who is lost in the fame cycle but who he genuinely cares about brought a lot of late 60s wholesomeness to the movie too.

To me there was a lot of brilliant decisions made in that movie, like mostly the only real music you hear is from whatever someone is playing on their radio/stereo within the scene or over loud speakers in a restaurant. There is hardly any traditional soundtrack and that is a grounding experience. Things that a lot of people wouldn’t notice in terms of framing or atmosphere building that aligned with the era of time the movie takes place in and subtly makes it feel more genuine and authentic. There were a lot of creative filmmaking decisions to highlight the simplicity of that time as we look back from an era of complex technology and media over-exposure.

The technical movie stuff is all well and good but what really makes Hollywood so special is it is also self-referential as it is a story of an aging Hollywood icon who doesn’t know if he still has the ability to perform to the standard he knows he is capable of achieving. He recognizes he is changing and the world isn’t what it used to be when he was at his greatest. There is self-doubt about whether his glory days are over or if it is going to be different but better future. It is a story set in Tarantino’s home turf that influences some of his most formative years, a time he wished he got to live in, full of movie magic and endless potential but we are stuck with someone aging out of it. It takes a child on a set where DiCaprio’s character feels like he has hit rock bottom to show him he still has potential. That listening to the new people in the industry and their take on how it is changing inspires him to keep going, that the best may still be ahead of him. He accepts that, doesn’t phone in his villain performance but embraces his experience and discovers he has a whole new potential. Which, at the end of the movie, directly leads him to quite literally walk through the gates into the next era of filmmaking that is about to start; into the home of one of the hottest new filmmakers for the 70s just before he hits it really big just after having saved his wife (and unborn child) from getting murdered and possibly averting a huge crime that ruined said filmmakers life.

It is a movie about a time we can’t recapture but we hold on a pedestal, about an event that was terribly tragic and changed the public perception around drugs, the hippie movement and Hollywood. Playtime was over and the addiction/withdrawal is setting in. A time that greatly influenced Tarantino as a person and he lived where it all happened, within the aftermath of Hollywood changing because of these events and its loss of the image of innocence. It influenced the world he lived in as a teenager as it ushered in the grit, grime and gore of the 70s It is the backdrop to his origin story but also to his mid-life crisis movie. Reconnecting him with the hometown as it was in his youth but where he gets to experience what he believes is the heyday of the industry he has dedicated his life to. All through the lens of an aging director looking back at it with an entirely different perspective.

It is kind of a love letter to the world that inspired him to be who he is today, reconnecting with who he was and wanted to be but as an adult moving into a new phase of his life. The movie is filled with cameos of so many of the actors he has worked with and influencers who inspired and shaped him during his career.

The audience and the filmmaker are both unsure of what happens next because for us it’s the retelling of a murder that changed so much of the world. For him it was a world he wanted to be a part of but it ended before he could. Hollywood is a closing out an obsession with the golden era he never got to experience but greatly influenced the one he did. By changing the real ending to these events he gives us a more hopeful one. An ending that if it happened in real life it could have extended that golden era so he may have gotten live in it. He allows potential for growth and new possibilities beyond what he has been obsessed with, almost like he is giving himself permission to allow that within himself.

He got married for the first time not long before the movie was released, at age 55, to a woman he broke up with and then reconnected with years later. They have two young kids now. He hasn’t made a movie in the 6 years since. He says he has one more in him but I think he is waiting until he has some more life perspective before he commits to whatever it ends up being because he isn’t the same person anymore that he was for those first 9 movies.

Anyway, that’s why I like it.